Big, Bad Wolf

by Essex, Bridget

  I watched her, mesmerized.

  I didn’t have the courage to tell her that her gaze made me warm enough to face a blizzard.

  ---

  “There's something different about you!” Sharon remarked, later that week. I was stacking recently returned books and humming softly to myself. I was grinning way too wide, kind of stupidly. I guess if I’d looked in a mirror, there might be cartoon hearts and little birds spinning around my head.

  “Really?” I asked, trying to hide my smile. My skirt was shorter, with a definite swish, soft satin that cradled my hips lovingly. Kara liked satin.

  “Yes,” she watched me move around behind the desk, and cocked her head, “are you seeing someone?”

  “You're somewhat behind the eight ball,” Sally was standing in her office's doorway, smoking with a frown. “Of course she's seeing someone. She’s practically twitterpated.”

  “I really don't think it's anyone's business,” I murmured, feeling my spirits fall. Her face was stony.

  “Of course it's not,” said Sally, and she pushed off from the wall, sliding back into her office without another word. The door clicked shut behind her.

  Sharon shrugged, “Don’t worry about her--I'm glad you're happy, Megan.”

  I was happy. I finished stacking the books, feeling a little anger move through me. And I shouldn’t feel guilty about it.

  “Don't let her get to you,” Rob said a little later. He was alphabetizing the Barney books in the kids section. There were a lot of Barney books. I picked through the “G's” trying to help, but finding my mind elsewhere. Go to the Museum with Barney!

  “Rob, it’s been…well, it’s been a really, really long time since I’ve dated anyone,” I said absentmindedly, as if it were an excuse. Giraffe went before Go. Giraffe Safari with Barney! “And I’ve been spending so much time with her now, you know? It’s been completely incredible.” And then so softly, I wondered if he’d heard me, I cleared my throat and said: “I think I’m beginning to fall for her.”

  “Then don't let Sally get to you,” he said resolutely, beginning on the “H's”. “She's just pissed off that you never gave her a chance. But that’s okay. This new girl, she make you happy?”

  “Really happy, Rob.”

  “Then go with it,” he smiled. “Enjoy it. It's really precious, you know? Not everyone finds someone who makes you happy.”

  Barney looked happy, dancing across the cover of his book with his tail carefully balanced. He was wearing roller skates.

  She made me happier than I’d ever been in my entire life.

  I knew I was lucky.

  ---

  I hadn't dreamed of wolves in days, blessed days that stood between me and my usually constant nightmares. I was pretty certain that this was the longest period I'd ever gone without dreaming of them. I woke in the morning, and breathed in deeply with a smile, and realized I'd been wolf free all night.

  It was freezing outside--the weatherman assured us all over the tinny radio that this was the coldest winter on record. Rob would snort and say it couldn't be possible, global warming and all. Sally would bundle herself into her office without a word and stay in there all day.

  I visited my grandmother that weekend in the best mood of my life. I pulled into the long driveway at her cabin and parked my little car in the patch of light from one of the warm kitchen windows. The cabin looked so beautiful at dusk with the winter snow laying around it, the pine trees rising above it, smoke curling out of its chimney and the snow contrasting so prettily with the dark color of the logs that had made up the cabin itself. It looked like a postcard. I pulled my hood tighter, got out of my car and walked the path to the door. It took awhile to step through some of the deeper piles of snow but I didn’t care. I whistled until I was standing on her rug, scraping off the snow on my boots.

  “You're seeing someone,” said my grandmother, as she poured the tea, made the biscuits. She still used lard from large tubs, taking a handful out with bare fingers, cutting it into the flour with forks. I watched her work but didn’t really see it, my head to the side as I stirred the honey into my tea with a crooked tin spoon.

  “Yes,” I told her, and watched her work. She was so precise in her movements, twisting the fork around the edge of the old Pyrex bowl covered in snowflakes, the blue of the bowl scratched all over from all the thousands of times it’d been washed.

  “Well? Are you going to tell me?” There was a sparkle in her eyes as she took out a mug, ready to cut the biscuits. I left my steaming tea to help her. Together, we floured the mug rims and sliced into the dough with the thick china.

  “Her name’s Kara,” I said quietly—you could hear the smile in my voice. “We've gone out on dates all this week…” What else could I tell my grandmother? There was so much to tell her, but I didn’t exactly know how to put it into words. My heart was too full.

  “That's good. She's nice, then?” Biscuits filled the baking sheet rapidly, evenly spaced, dashed with butter. She put the first tray into the oven, and fiddled with the knobs to adjust the temperature.

  “Yes, she's actually wonderful,” I swept the flour off my hands. “She's just so…I mean, she’s gorgeous, and she’s funny, and she’s so good to me, so kind and thoughtful. I'd never thought it could be like that.”

  “It’s been a long time for you, hasn’t it?” my grandmother glanced my way, a twinkle in her eye. Great. Even she knew it’d been a long time. I chuckled, grinning as I shook my head. “Are you nervous,” she asked, then, leaning against the counter, “or are you enjoying things?”

  “A little bit of both. But it has been a while,” I told her, wiping the flour off my hands.

  “Why sure.” Gramma sat down at the kitchen table and traced a grain in the wood with a thumbnail. “What do you know about her?”

  “Not that much. It’s just been a few dates…” I began to blush. Toward the end of the week, there hadn’t been that much talking involved. Mostly, there had been a lot of making out on my couch. “She really likes art.”

  “Did you tell her you were an artist?”

  “Gramma, that's ridiculous. I was not.”

  “You were.” She glanced at me resolutely with a frown. “And you were fantastic, but, for whatever reason, you put that behind you. I'll never understand why you did it, Megan.”

  “Can we talk about something else?” I snapped, and, immediately afterward, regretting snapping at her. I sighed and glanced at my grandmother and was surprised to see her staring out the window at the snowfall.

  “Going to be a bad storm tonight,” she said, switching the subject. “It'll be hard on the wolves.”

  It was added almost as an afterthought. I swallowed and stared down at my tea. The wolves again.

  “There are no wolves, Gramma,” I said softly.

  “Don't be ridiculous, girl. They're out in the backyard right now.” My grandmother took a swig of her own coffee, throwing her head back as she swallowed it down. “They've been coming in and out all day.”

  It sent shivers down my spine, the way she said it, though I knew she didn't mean it. She couldn't possibly mean it. The doctors had asked to up her medication, but I knew it wouldn’t do any good, might actually do harm because she was still taking care of herself so well. And she firmly believed in what she said as honest fact. They doctors had had big words for it, but what it came down to was that she was not a danger to herself or others. That's what really mattered.

  “Good tea, Gramma,” I said.

  “They liked it, too,” she said, and got up to check on the biscuits.

  ---

  I stood in the center of my room, looking up at the sheets of white paper, peppering the walls over the faded wallpaper. Fairies and unicorns and giants and damsels in distress. That's what had filled my heart as a child, and I'd taken pencil (sometimes pen) in hand, and had drawn out all the visions onto faded white paper. I'd been proud of them, so proud, and Gramma had helped me hang them up, using a kitc
hen chair as a stool and tacks as nails. We'd hung them up together, and afterwards had had a cup of tea, surveying our handiwork with the pride that a gallery master must have. But this wasn't a gallery, and they weren't art. They were only the scribbles of a kid, completely drunk on imagination.

  I stared up at them now with a frown. I could see all of the things wrong with each picture: necks too big, arms at bad angles. I'd thought they were pretty darn good as a kid, but I'd grown out of such naive thinking.

  It was time to take them down.

  I had a kitchen chair with me again. The same kind I'd dragged to the cupboards as a toddler, using them to climb up towards the cookie jar. Now, I stood it against the far wall, near the small bow window. I climbed up onto the chair’s seat, reaching my hands toward the paper.

  I paused a moment. A particularly soulful fairy looked at me across the space of time and wonder, scribbled effortlessly on a particularly white piece of paper. So many creatures and flights of fancy, so many mistakes. I stared hard at it.

  The strains of a completely crappy version of the Canon in D washed over me--my cell phone was ringing. I climbed down off the chair and fished it out of my purse. I didn’t recognize the number. “Hello?” I called into the receiver as I flipped it open.

  “Hi!” It was Kara, though her voice sounded far away, weeded out by bits of static and the “shushing” sound of a bad connection. “Megan?”

  “I'm here,” I said, louder than necessary. The static grew louder too.

  “How are you?” It sounded cheerful, but I could barely make out the words.

  “Fine! Listen, where are you calling from? I'm losing you, I can barely hear you!”

  “Reception...mountain, yeah?”

  “What?” I called into the receiver. Technically, I shouldn't have been getting much reception at all. The cell phone could be used for texting on the mountain, but calls were almost always lost. I knew it was probably my phone causing the problems, and I put it on speaker, holding it up higher. As if that would actually help. I snorted.

  “Kara?” I called into the phone.

  It cut out dead. I'd lost the call.

  Frustrated, I shut it and turned towards the door. Maybe I could get a better reception in the front yard.

  The kitchen chair and tacked up papers remained where they were, forgotten.

  ---

  “...So you see, that's what those boys 'ought to be doin',” the man's voice drifted up to me from where I stood on the stairs, and I squinted in the half light. Had Gramma left the television on?

  But no. There were two shadows in the hallway, and I heard my grandmother's distinct voice say: “No--that's all right. I've got it.”

  “Gramma?” I called, hopping down the final two steps. “Do you have company?”

  “It's just Clyde, sweetheart,” she called from the hallway. “He said that he hasn't gotten a chance to talk to you about the car yet.”

  “Hi, Megan!” boomed Clyde's cheerful voice.

  “Hi, Clyde!” The entry hallway was small, but I peeked my head around the corner. My grandmother was a tall woman, still not doubled by age, but Clyde towered over her. “What can I do you for?”

  “Remember when I towed your car last week, Megan?”

  Was it really just last week? It seemed a lifetime ago. “Yes,” I said, uncertainly – wondering if he’d want money. I hadn’t brought any cash with me.

  “She been working right and everything?”

  “Yes!” He smiled hugely at that, nodding his big head. He wore a big plaid shirt and a baseball cap with a Budweiser logo on it, the cap hiding his bald head as he wrinkled his big nose.

  “That's great, then. I just came by to make certain it was okay.”

  I smiled at him. “I really appreciate your helping me out.”

  “Anytime,” he grinned and took his hat off to run a big-fingered hand over his bald head. He put his hat back on. “Ma'am, Megan.” And he left the entryway, opening the door to the chilled outdoors. I shivered in spite of myself as he left.

  “Such a nice guy.” I grinned at my grandmother. “He came three miles just to ask that! And it was so sweet of him not to charge me anything for the towing.”

  “Do you want some more tea, dear?” My grandmother asked, absentmindedly. “I just put a fresh kettle on.”

  “Sure, Gramma,” I walked past her to the kitchen, where I now heard the insistent shriek of the teakettle, boiling on the stove.

  I turned off the stove and took out the tea strainer from the drawer. I glanced up, out the window, to the backyard, mantled with the deep blue of a sunset hidden by the snow.

  I dropped the tea strainer.

  She was tall, she would come up to my hips if I was standing there, in the snow next to her. Her shaggy pelt was darker than midnight, scattered with stars…snowflakes clung to strands of her fur, and I could see her breath fog out into the darkness around her from a broad, long muzzle. Her eyes gleamed. She was looking right at me.

  A thin pane of glass stood between the wolf and me. She was only a few steps away from the window, staring up with eyes that shone from the depths like cuts of silver. If she leaped, if she came for me, there would be nothing to stop her but a pane of glass. A pane of glass as thin as a dream.

  I stood without moving, without breathing as all the blood in my body began to pound through me with fear. Everything was brighter and sharper, and it seemed in that moment that I could count the snowflakes in the air between us.

  She sniffed the air, and didn’t blink or look away as I stood there, shaking slightly. But then, as quickly as if someone had called to her, the wolf turned and with a graceful gait, loped away into the woods.

  My blood still thundered through me, and I could barely take in a gasp of breath without feeling like I needed to faint, but I couldn’t believe it. I leaned forward at the waist against the counter, gripping its edge with hands white knuckled.

  It couldn’t possibly have been real. In the snow, I’d been pretty darn close to dying—I’d become feverish and I’m sure there was the possibility of hypothermia. I’d been hallucinating when I thought I'd seen the wolves. I dreamed about them because people dream about things they fear.

  This, just now? It couldn’t possibly have happened.

  I blindly staggered to the front entryway, sticking numb feet into boots, struggling into my parka. I had to see, had to know for certain. I wasn't like my Gramma, a woman believed that there were wolves in the cold who came to pay her a visit.

  I wasn’t like my grandmother. I wasn’t becoming crazy.

  The cold was bone-deep and biting, a chill that moved right through me as I stepped out the back door. Te drifting snowflakes, so lazy in their descent, clung to my hair and eyelashes, freezing me. I stumbled into the backyard, intent on showing myself the truth.

  I tripped on a big, unexpected drift and fell face-first into the snow, putting out my bare hands to keep from falling in. The cold stung my skin like bites. I was shaking and my teeth rattled in my head, but the cold wasn’t why I shook.

  There, next to my bare hands, thrust deep in the snow were massive prints, larger than spread fingers.

  Paw prints.

  ---

  “There aren’t any wolves in the mountains,” said Rob, continuing in his never ending task of re-shelving the children's books. I didn't help him this time. I stood there with my feet firmly planted apart, arms folded. Even thinking about it caused my heart rate to skyrocket.

  “I know what I saw, Rob,” I muttered, then--because, really--what else could I say? It was obvious, and I knew it was true...there weren't wolves in the mountains, not for years and years, if there had even been any at all. I was a little hazy on the local botany, but I knew there weren't wolves, just like there weren't panthers, there weren't wild horses or big cats. They’d been killed out by our ancestors. There were no wolves in the mountains.

  “Maybe...maybe, honey…” he was standing, now, dusting his broad hands
off on his tweed pants. “Maybe it's been a little hard on you, recently, what with the accident, and getting a new girlfriend...and I mean...your grandmother's ailing health,” he wasn't meeting my eyes, and I felt a cold sweat pass over me.

  It was kind of obvious that he was giving me the it's okay that you're crazy talk.

  We both knew that mental illness ran strongly through my family. I mean, look at my grandmother.

  “I know what I saw,” I repeated through gritted teeth. “Next time I'll take a picture to show you. The paw prints were huge, Rob.”

  “So, what are you going to do about it?”

  “Do?” The very idea was ridiculous. What do you do with a wolf who comes to visit? “Call animal control?” I said weakly. He laughed.

  “I mean, you could.” He shrugged and stretched overhead. There was another stack of books to go through, all Nancy Drew. These were the old editions I remembered checking out from this selfsame library years ago. I had read each page with rapt attention, turned them with careful hands. I picked up one of the volumes, turned it over in my hands.

  He looked at me for a moment, eyes unreadable. “I mean—you could call animal control. If you think it best.”

  There was an added bit to that sentence, the part that didn't quite make it out of his mouth. “If you think it best” meant “if you think they won't call you crazy.” They knew about my grandmother, everyone in the valley knew about my grandmother. I might be questioned, might be tested, and I knew I wasn't where my grandmother had gone quite yet.

  I bit my lip and leaned against the shelves with a heavy sigh. “I may be a lot of things,” I told him then, with resolution, “but I’m not crazy, Rob.”

  “Honey, things have been tough on you,” he reiterated, now looking at me with a mixture of pity and something I couldn't quite place. “Why don't you, I don't know... take a few days off? Just for yourself?”

  I snorted. “After everything that’s happened, do you honestly think Sally would let me? I mean…who wouldn’t want a little vacation?” The very thought of a few days to myself—maybe myself and Kara—made my heart begin to beat a little faster. “But Sally would never--”